Natural Language Processing

The Natural Language Processing Research Group , established in 1993 , is one of the largest and most successful language processing groups in the UK and has a strong global reputation.

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Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary field that uses computational methods:

To investigate the properties of written human language and to model the cognitive mechanisms underlying the understanding and production of written language (scientific focus)

To develop novel practical applications involving the intelligent processing of written human language by computer (engineering focus) 

Research Themes

Information Access

Building applications to improve access to information in massive text collections, such as the web, newswires and the scientific literature

Language Resources and Architectures for NLP

Providing resources - both data and processing resources - for research and development in NLP. Includes platforms for developing and deploying real world language processing applications, most notably GATE, the General Architecture for Text Engineering.

Machine Translation

 Building applications to translate automatically between human languages, allowing access to the vast amount of information written in foreign languages and easier communication between speakers of different languages.

Human-Computer Dialogue Systems
Building systems to allow spoken language interaction with computers or embodied conversational agents, with applications in areas such as keyboard-free access to information, games and entertainment, articifial companions.
Detection of Reuse and Anomaly

Investigating techniques for determining when texts or portions of texts have been reused or where portions of text do not fit with surrounding text. These techniques have applications in areas such as plagiarism and authorship detection and in discovery of hidden content.

Foundational Topics

Developing applications with human-like capabilities for processing language requires progress in foundational topics in language processing. Areas of interest include: word sense disambiguation, semantics of time and events.

NLP for social media

Social Media, Online Disinformation, and Elections: A Quantitative, "Big Data" Perspective. 

Biomedical Text Processing

GATE in Biomedical Text Processing

Research staff
  • Ibrahim Abu Farha
  • Mehmet Bakir
  • Dr Emma Barker
  • Amit Gajibhiye
  • Dr Mark Greenwood
  • Wei He
  • Mali Jin
  • Tashin Khan
  • Yue Li
  • Yida Mu
  • Mugdha Pandya
  • Muneerah Patel
  • Oleysa Razuvayevskaya
  • Ian Roberts
  • Iknoor Singh
  • Jake Vasilakes
  • Ahmad Zareie
  • Cass Zhao

Visiting staff

Publications

Academic articles

Here you can find research publications for the Natural Language Processing Research Group, listed by academic.  The head link navigates to the official web page for the relevant academic (with highlighted favourite publications).  The remaining links navigate to their DBLP author page, their Google Scholar citations page and optionally a self-maintained publications page.

Academic staff

Prof Kalina Bontcheva (Head of Group) DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Dr Nikolaos Aletras DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Prof. Hamish Cunningham DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Prof. Rob Gaizauskas DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Dr Mark Hepple DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Dr Chenghua Lin DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Dr Carolina Scarton DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Prof. Lucia Specia DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Dr Mark Stevenson DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Prof. Aline Villavicencio (Deputy Head of Group) DBLP GoogleScholar Web
Prof. Yorick Wilks DBLP GoogleScholar  
Senior research staff      
Dr Diana Maynard DBLP GoogleScholar Web
 

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